/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12132237]

"There is nothing in the world more profound or powerful than this work. This is the ultimate and greatest word that human thought has yet produced, it is the bitter irony expressible by man, and if the world were to end and someone were to ask there, somewhere, 'Well, did you understand your life on earth? What conclusions did you reach about it?' one could silently point to Don Quixote: 'Here is my conclusion about life; can you judge me for it?'"
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky

[Anonymous No.12133498]

Thank you. I was looking for this quote two days ago, and I couldn’t find it.

Gracias!

[Anonymous No.12133504]

>>12132237
ok ok calm down I’ll read it

[Anonymous No.12133529]

Is it an easy read?

[Anonymous No.12133552]

>>12133529
Surprisingly yes. It’s a comedy.

[Anonymous No.12133558]

>>12132237
I'm yet to read it. But the masterpiece of all literature is The Divine Comedy.

[Anonymous No.12133591]

>>12133558
I didn’t get it and no i didn’t read it in Italian ffs. Imagine learning that shit tier tutti frutti language for one book when we’ve already got Milton AND Blake.

[Anonymous No.12133596]

>>12133529
Yes providing you don't get an older translation

[Anonymous No.12133613]

>>12133591
If you already speak another Latin language it's not really learning it, more like discovering it. Anyway, I've read it in Italian and I have to say Dante was on another level. I feel sorry for monolingualfags. Blake and Milton are great, I agree. I love being multilingual, but sadly life's too short for Russian and German.

[Anonymous No.12133615]

>>12133529
Very easy.

>>12133558
I agree. I consider Homer and Dante to be above Cervantes.

>>12133591
Milton and Blake are nothing compared to Dante. I've read them all in the original. I love Milton. Both are too full of rhetoric to be placed near Dante, they're not even the same thing. Not at all. They have different ideas of poetry. If you read Milton's Italian sonnets then the difference gets pretty clear: Dante was Medieval and Milton was a Renaissance man, a follower of Petrarch.

If you learn Italian, you will see there' s an entire world separating Dante from Petrarch, and also that the entire Western poetic tradition chose Petrarch as their role model (including Shakespeare, also a child of Petrarch) instead of Dante. Only with Eliot, Pound and others did the influence of Dante become more important than that of Petrarch.

[Anonymous No.12133636]

>>12133615
I’m assuming you’re talking about form because in terms of imagery and
content, Dante has nothing on Blake and in terms of argument, Paradise Lost was more compelling to me than The Divine Comedy. But then again if you are talking about form I can’t say at all, because I don’t know Italian and probably will never.

[Anonymous No.12133684]

>>12133636
No, I am talking about both, but I won't expand on it, because I am too tired to make a comparative analysis, so that eventual discussion that we were to make would be focused on hand-picked examples, which is no good.

[Anonymous No.12133686]

>>12133684
>any eventual

Fixed.

[Anonymous No.12135090]

>>12133529
Yes, and funny.

[Anonymous No.12135114]

>>12132237
Don Quixote is the closest the western tradition has got to Zhuangzi (i.e. to being correct).

[Anonymous No.12135866]

>>12133613
>but sadly life's too short for Russian and German

Don't think like that, there's plenty of time. By being multilingual you already have a big advantage when learning new languages. German should be easy for you because you already speak English, and Russian isn't that bad either (don't listen to brainlets who say Russian is top-tier difficulty, it really isn't).

[Anonymous No.12136162]

>>12135866
Yeah, Russian is mid-tier difficult. I wouldn't bother with it, though. Plenty of Russian literature is translated into English, and by good translators, too. Same could be said for German or French but they're so easy to learn that it's probably worth it, if you're interested in their specific literature.